[kepler-dev] Actor is not ready to fire messages

[Timothy McPhillips]

Hi Christopher,

The idea of requiring that actors declare SDF-safety by implementing  
a Java interface is interesting.  There seem to be a number of  
related issues it'd be nice to address at some point.

A general issue, it seems to me, is that it can be hard for users  
(developers included) to know what components (actors, directors,  
etc) can be used productively together. Knowing what actors are  
compatible with which directors is one example of this issue.   
Another example is that different actors may be incompatible with  
each other due to differences in how data is managed (ports vs  
parameters, sequences of tokens vs arrays of tokens when handling  
variably-sized collections of data, etc).  One may find an actor that  
sounds like it does what one desires, but due to differences in how  
data is consumed or produced it may turn out that the actor won't  
work with the actors (or director) one has already selected for use  
in a workflow.   So there may be multiple dimensions in which  
component incompatibility may arise.

Examining the documentation or source code for actors can reveal why  
certain components don't work well together, but I wonder if there  
isn't a more general solution that makes it easy to see what actors  
and directors are meant to work well together in the first place.

What do you think?

Tim

On Jan 8, 2008, at 7:51 AM, Christopher Brooks wrote:

> Are you using the SDF director?
> My suggestion is to not use BooleanSwitch in SDF.
> As to why, see Dan Higgins' explanation in
> http://www.kepler-project.org/Wiki.jsp?page=DirectorsInKepler
>
> My understanding is that BooleanSwitch may be used in SDF, but only
> under carefully controlled situations.  This issue seems to come up
> fairly regularly with BooleanSwitch, the documentation should be more
> clear, I'll see what I can do.  Maybe we should disable BooleanSwitch
> under SDF, or at least have it print a message or something.  Perhaps
> actors that are SDF safe should implement a specific interface, or
> actors in actor/lib that are not SDF safe should implement a specific
> interface.
>
> _Christopher
>
> --------
>
>     Hi,
>
>     I create two custom actor, one of them reads a binary file and  
> other
>     writes the input into a netcdf file (i also update my actors  
> according
>     to earlier suggestions about stopping workflow) and the workflow
>     structure is similar to BinaryFileRead and BinaryFileWrite but  
> in my
>     case there is only one file which has multiple time step data.  
> I am
>     using Boolean Switch actor to stop my work flow but at the last
>     iteration it gives me "Actor is not ready to fire" messages.  
> So, I check
>     the "end of file" port of my custom binary file reader actor using
>     display actor and it seems ok.
>
>     any suggestion will be helpful,
>
>     best wishes
>
>     --ufuk
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